We are a two man Indie Game Development team from South Africa. Our first game, Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant is available on Steam (Click to buy Delta Quadrant) - our second game, Catch a Falling Star, is in the Greenlight process! please vote for it :)

Friday, August 7, 2015

Progress for Catch a Falling Star - Storing Player Data

We are making awesome progress with Catch a Falling Star, and I'm happy to report on some of it in this post :)

Firstly, we have decided to not limit the game to Android anymore. As developing continues, we actually found that the game plays very nicely on PC as well, especially with a controller!

We bought a great Unity asset that has proven extremely useful for implementing all kinds of controller support to our game - it is called Rewired, and it handles everything for making your game work with a controller - check it out here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21676

Then, one thing we're sorry we never did for Delta Quadrant was localization - making the game available in more than one language. Since Catch a Falling Star won't be having too much text in the game, we decided to build in multiple language support from the beginning :) This functionality was done by Jayson this week, and it works exceptionally well. Going to make adding more languages a breeze!

Lastly, Player Data :D

This one excites me a great deal! We have an in-game currency called Star Bux (see what I did there haha!) - you earn Star Bux by catching coins while playing, watching ads (on the mobile versions), or by completing daily challenges. Then, with the Star Bux you can unlock additional baskets and themes to play with.

Now, we could store the amount of Star Bux you have locally, but that would make it easy for people to hack and modify, so we decided to look for an online system we can use for this. Our search led us to the very awesome PlayFab - it's quite a system! And I had a ton of fun implementing it this week.

At first I didn't know where to begin, but they have great support and they are Unity supporters! So there is a Unity SDK for PlayFab already. And they have a few example projects that made it so much easier.

Anyway, now Star Bux is stored on PlayFab for each player. They also have a system called the Catalog - basically the part that will handle the inventory for the players. In our case, we have the baskets and themes as part of the catalog. We can give each item various attributes and how much Star Bux it'll cost, etc. This makes it extremely easy to make modifications in the game without having to rebuild the game. Each basket and theme the player unlocks will get added to his/her inventory. PlayFab can also store various statistics, and we can decide exactly what to store. For example, the high scores, how many times they've played, how many power ups they've caught, etc. The possibilities are endless!

And the best part? You can login with Steam, Facebook, Google, iOS Game Center, Email Address and Kongregate to mention a few!

For now I've added the base functionality for PlayFab - a player can log in on his PlayFab profile, I can retrieve how many Star Bux he has, and what his high score was. I can also send the commands to modify those values.

It was a good week indeed! We can't wait to load a playable demo.

Oh, and let me wrap up this post with one of our most beautiful themes yet: